Friday, October 29, 2010

King Coal and yesterday's news

Here's another picture from my man cave. That behemoth in the front is, I'm just guessing here, the old coal furnace. It's not connected to anything anymore. The new oil furnace is in the background. The coal furnace is right next to the garbage shoot, so I'm guessing people sendt combustibles down and the janitor stoked the fire with his neigbour's old newspapers.

The lids on the garbage shoots are now locked. A whole genre of urban legends told primarily by and to kids disappeared with the demise of garbage shoots. There was always some boy who had gone for a ride in one of them and had experienced something exciting or, to the listener, pleasingly horrid.

Garbage now, of course, is carted far away. I am not sure how this works out efficiency-wise, but I like the idea of processing waste right where you're at. And every level of complexity, usually, makes things more messy and useless. Theoretically, in an apartment building like this, you could burn your newspapers to heat up the water tanks a couple of degrees, have a worm bin for food scraps and a large compost bin for all the ca-ca.

3 comments:

"Stuff like that" is doable if people can just get by their preconceived ideas of what is nasty. Humanure toilets are a good example. When I speak of them noses wrinkle up and lips turn down yet those same people think nothing of a yard full of dog crap and will actually go out and pick it up. They also don't think any thing of flushing thousand of gallons of drinking water to get rid of tissue paper. I find that obscene. I love that furnace. It looks big enough to get a body into. Some stove polish and a few brass highlights and it would be a work of art not that it isn't already.

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Not a hermit any more, strictly speaking.

I have lived in assorted woodland cabins almost my entire adult life, lately five years on my own land, five miles from the nearest road. No mains electricity, no running water. After a decade of mushing, I am now preparing myself for fatherhood and spending more time in The Towns.